Resource Dividend Research Articles

Labour Commodification and Global Justice

Abstract In this article, I maintain that the social process of labour commodification, through which the individual capability to uphold a decent welfare is bound to participation in the labour market, poses a problem of justice from the republican prospective on freedom as non-domination. I first discuss the reasons we might hold that capitalism brings a form of systemic domination by virtue of one of its intrinsic features: unequal access to the means of production. Then, I argue for a minimum de-commodification of labour power as a criterion of justice, adding that it should be conceived as a cosmopolitan proviso because states unfairly suffer from their limited economic capacity to neutralize capitalist systemic domination. Lastly, I compare the normative account of global justice that I am proposing in this article with sufficientarianism, with the capability approach, and with Thomas Pogge's 'Global Resources Dividend'

Resource rents distribution, income inequality and poverty in Iran

Our goal is to examine the income inequality and welfare effects of the direct distribution of resource rents and subsequent taxation in Iran. We use survey-based microdata that covers 140,000 individuals, which include more than 36,000 Iranian urban and rural households in 2009. We examine how direct distribution of oil and gas rents among all citizens and a subsequent direct income tax differ from distributional impacts of targeted policies on income inequality and poverty in Iran. Our analysis shows that the resource dividend policy with a subsequent direct income tax has a significant decreasing effect on the household Gini index while targeted policies are more effective in reducing number of households under the poverty line.

Harnessing hydrocarbon revenues: reflections on Russia

Economies, like Russia, blessed with resource abundance, do not usually perform well during the period of commodity price boom. The optimal policy of managing resource revenues prescribes to commit the permanent income rule to smooth the resource dividend in efficiency units and to smooth the real exchange rate. During the commodity price boom, Russia followed partially this prescribed policy, but the situation changed after the crash of oil and gas prices in 2014. Possible ways to overcome the consequences of low oil and gas prices are discussed, paying particular attention to the lack of economic complexity and the need for diversifi cation and capabilities for growth and development of the Russian economy. Refs 29. Figs 3.

Saving Alberta's resource revenues: Role of intergenerational and liquidity funds

We use a welfare-based intertemporal stochastic optimization model and historical data to estimate the size of the optimal intergenerational and liquidity funds and the corresponding resource dividend available to the government of the Canadian province Alberta. To first-order of approximation, this dividend should be a constant fraction of total above- and below-ground wealth, complemented by additional precautionary savings at initial times to build up a small liquidity fund to cope with oil price volatility. The ongoing dividend equals approximately 30 per cent of government revenue and requires building assets of approximately 40 per cent of GDP in 2030, 100 per cent of GDP in 2050 and 165 per cent in 2100. Finally, the effect of the recent plunge in oil prices on our estimates is examined. Our recommendations are in stark contrast with historical and current government policy.

Global Justice and Natural Resource Taxation

Proposals for resource taxes and associated transfers have played a very prominent role in contemporary debates about global justice, from Beitz’s ‘resource redistribution principle,’ to Steiner’s Global Fund, to Pogge’s Global Resources Dividend. But such proposals have also attracted some important criticisms, including the claim that resource taxes are unmotivated, or that their impact would be regressive. This paper responds to these challenges, and at the same time it seeks to clarify the role resource taxes should play in an egalitarian project. Still, when we evaluate their potential impact much may turn out to hang on just which resources should be taxed, and which of the ways in which we engage with resources – owning them, extracting them, or consuming them – should render us liable to paying taxes. I will have rather less to say in response to this question, but I shall suggest that in light of the diverse goals which resource taxes are likely to be charged with advancing, a single undifferentiated global tax on natural resources (undifferentiated, that is, either in the sense that it targets all resources, or in the sense that it is exclusively targeted at for instance ownership or consumption) is unlikely to promote justice most effectively. On the assumption that a more fine-grained approach may be desirable, the paper ends with a discussion of several proposals for specific resource taxes.

Saving Alberta's Resource Revenues: Role of Intergenerational and Liquidity Funds

We use a welfare-based intertemporal stochastic optimization model and historical data to estimate the size of the optimal intergenerational and liquidity funds and the corresponding resource dividend available to the government of the Canadian province Alberta. To first-order of approximation, this dividend should be a constant fraction of total above- and below-ground wealth, complemented by additional precautionary savings at initial times to build up a small liquidity fund to cope with oil price volatility. The ongoing dividend equals approximately 30 per cent of government revenue and requires building assets of approximately 40 per cent of GDP in 2030, 100 per cent of GDP in 2050 and 165 per cent in 2100. Finally, the effect of the recent plunge in oil prices on our estimates is examined. Our recommendations are in stark contrast with historical and current government policy.

Climate change justice through taxation?

How best to improve climate mitigation measures while we wait for an international consensus on climate policy? This is a practical problem raising important normative issues. The problem is the urgent need for better climate mitigation measures that is time-sensitive: conditions can only deteriorate over time rendering the problem and the relevant stakes even more pressing. The normative issues raised include whether a second-best solution is compelling given these non-ideal conditions and what form such a solution ought to take. This article responds to issues raised in Rolf H. Weber’s insightful piece in this special issue, such as the balancing of mitigation policies and securing market competitiveness leading to Weber’s defence of border tax adjustment. This article critically examines Weber’s position on competitiveness and its connection to border tax adjustment as a second-best option from a justice-based perspective. It is argued that strategies based around taxation—such as the Global Resources Dividend, the polluter pays principle and border tax adjustment—are problematic and unconvincing alternatives.

Re-spacing African drylands: territorialization, sedentarization and indigenous commodification in the Ethiopian pastoral frontier

This paper traces the re-spacing of pastoral drylands in Africa. We argue that rendering pastoral resources legible and profitable occurs both within and beyond the state. Through a multi-sited case study from Ethiopia's Somali region, we excavate different mechanisms of sedentarization, whereby processes of state territorialization and indigenous commodification become mutually entangled. Sedentarization is not imposed by the state or corporate capital, but by indigenous merchants who capture the frontier's potential resource dividend. Land appropriation in the drylands is co-produced by political claims to territory, capital investment and new technopolitics through which indigenous (pastoral, Somali) merchants and politicians become complicit with the state's project of territorialization and sedentarization in a self-governing fashion. The irony of this situation is that the (Ethiopian) state has failed to consolidate sedentarization through planned interventions. Instead, capital investment by local and transnational Somali merchants has opened up a neoliberal frontier that re-spaces drylands towards increasing sedentarization.

Redistribution, Globalisation, and Multi-Level Governance

Global income inequalities are met with increasing calls for direct supranational redistribution. This paper argues that from the perspective of political feasibility, this approach should not be prioritised. We use the example of tax competition to show that supranational regulation that stops short of direct redistribution has better chances of being implemented. Moreover, as the case of tax competition illustrates, such regulation can help to shore up the capacity of nation states to redistribute internally, which indirectly tends to reduce global inequalities, too. Against this background, we formulate the conditional subsidiarity principle of redistribution. It states that when the case for direct supranational redistribution is built on the alleged incapacity of the state to redistribute due to the pressures of globalisation, our first instinct should be regulatory reform in order to restore this capacity. Finally, the paper asks whether two prominent proposals for global taxation – the global resource dividend and the financial transaction tax – pass the test of the conditional subsidiarity principle.

A left-libertarian proposal for egalitarian world ownership

In this paper I advocate a left-libertarian approach to egalitarian world ownership that combines common ownership of land, following Henry George (where private appropriation is subject to the payment of rent), with joint ownership of finite and exhaustible resources such as oil (where use is subject to a collective decision-making process and tax paid at the point of extraction). This rent and tax together create a common fund available for global distribution. I argue that this approach offers improvements on Hillel Steiner’s proposal for a global fund, and Thomas Pogge’s proposal for a Global Resources Dividend (GRD) since it does not penalize states for the inclusion of valuable resources within their territory that are not being used, while it also does not allow states to benefit from the use of resources elsewhere while simultaneously refusing to exploit the resources within their own borders. Moreover, joint ownership need not conflict with the libertarian commitment to self-ownership, as is often thought to be the case, and when supplementing common ownership of land it can provide an egalitarian outcome as well as greater protection for future generations and the environment.

Direct Distribution of Rents and the Resource Curse in Iran: A Micro-Econometric Analysis

Our goal is to examine the income inequality and welfare effects of the direct distribution of resource rents and subsequent taxation in Iran. We use rich micro survey data covering more than 36,000 Iranian households in 2009. Our micro-simulations show that the direct distribution of resource rents among all citizens and the imposition of an additional direct income tax have a significant negative effect on the household GINI index and on poverty. We also examine three alternative policies to the resource dividend (RD) policy. The results show that the RD policy is the most successful policy for addressing rents-induced inequality.

Redistribution, Globalisation, and Multi-level Governance

Global income inequalities are met with increasing calls for direct supranational redistribution. This article argues that from the perspective of political feasibility, this approach should not be prioritised. We use the example of tax competition to show that supranational regulation that stops short of direct redistribution has better chances of being implemented. Moreover, as the case of tax competition illustrates, such regulation can help to shore up the capacity of nation states to redistribute internally, which indirectly tends to reduce global inequalities, too. Against this background, we formulate the conditional subsidiarity principle of redistribution. It states that when the case for direct supranational redistribution is built on the alleged incapacity of the state to redistribute due to the pressures of globalisation, our first instinct should be regulatory reform in order to restore this capacity. Finally, the article asks whether two prominent proposals for global taxation – the global resource dividend and the financial transaction tax – pass the test of the conditional subsidiarity principle.

A Boundedly Rational Analysis of Global Distributive Justice

In the present paper we analyze two prominent global distributive justice theories, i.e. Pogge’s Global Resource Dividend theory (1994) and Dorsey’s maxificing welfarism (2005) under an assumption of bounded rationality. We consider that the agencies responsible for distributing resources are informationally constrained in regard to the assessment of economic positions in society and cognitively constrained in regard to the decision making process within the agency. We argue that under these conditions the distributive patterns prescribed by both theories can be severely distorted. Further, in Dorsey’s case bounded rationality can even lead to a complete failure of the theory, since not only are the resulting distributions sub-optimal if we introduce the possibility for a single mistake in the identification process, but they can also be completely redundant by prescribing distributions which are not capable of lifting a single citizen to the minimum level required for the fulfillment of basic needs. We further show that for both theories the identification problem becomes more severe and that the agencies are more susceptible to make mistakes in circumstances of extreme poverty, i.e. the circumstances primarily targeted by the theories. Aside from this main result, we also obtain three secondary results: 1. we extend the ongoing debates in political philosophy between ideal and non-ideal theories and in particular between fact-insensitivity and fact-sensitivity, 2. we provide a preliminary defense of a proportional distributive principle for global justice and 3. we provide a new starting point for the construction of arguments regarding the nature of the agency (e.g. global government, national governments, UN institutions, international NGOs) entitled to distribute resources in global justice theories.

“Lessons from the Alaska Model: How the Permanent Fund Dividend provides a Model for Reform Worldwide”

Abstract Many resource-exporting nations have sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), but only the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) pays a regular dividend to citizens. They call it the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). Every Alaskan citizen-resident has received a small share of the returns to the state's SWF since 1982. This article argues, using rigorous qualitative analysis of Alaska politics and of the social science literature on the effects of the APF and PFD that there are important lessons that all nations can learn from Alaska's unique experience. First, Resource dividends work and they're popular. Second, a state does not have to be resource rich to have a resource dividend. Third, states have resource dividends because the people took advantage of the opportunity. Therefore, the people must look for opportunities. Fourth, members of the political community must think not only like joint owners of their resources, not only like monopolistic owners of their resources, but also like custodians of their resources ...

Beyond Poverty: Social Justice in a Global Marketplace

The social justice paradigm, developed in philosophy by John Rawls and others, reaches limits when confronted with diverse populations, unsound governments, and global markets. Its parameters are further limited by a traditional utilitarian approach to both industrial actors and consumer behaviors. Finally, by focusing too exclusively on poverty, as manifested in insufficient incomes or resources, the paradigm overlooks the oppressive role that gender, race, and religious prejudice play in keeping the poor subordinated. The authors suggest three ways in which marketing researchers could bring their unique expertise to the question of social justice in a global economy: by (1) reinventing the theoretical foundation laid down by thinkers such as Rawls, (2) documenting and evaluating emergent “feasible fixes” to achieve justice (e.g., the global resource dividend, cause-related marketing, Fair Trade, philanthrocapitalism), and (3) exploring the parameters of the consumption basket that would be minimally required to achieve human capabilities.

Global Taxes on Natural Resources

AbstractThomas Pogge's Global Resources Dividend relies on a flat tax on the use of natural resources to fund the eradication of world poverty. Hillel Steiner's Global Fund taxes the full rental value of owned natural resources and distributes the proceeds equally. The paper compares the Dividend and the Fund and defends the Global Share, a novel proposal that taxes either use or ownership, does so (when possible) progressively, and distributes the revenue according to a prioritarian rather than a sufficientarian or egalitarian principle.

Allowing the Poor to Share the Earth

AbstractTwo of the greatest challenges facing humanity are environmental degradation and the persistence of poverty. Both can be met by instituting a Global Resources Dividend (GRD) that would slow pollution and natural-resource depletion while collecting funds to avert poverty worldwide. Unlike Hillel Steiner's Global Fund, which is presented as a fully just regime governing the use of planetary resources, the GRD is meant as merely a modest but widely acceptable and therefore realistic step toward justice. Paula Casal has set forth various ways in which this step might be improved upon. Solid counter-arguments can be given to her criticisms and suggestions. But to specify the best (effective and realizable) design of an appropriate global institutional mechanism with some confidence, economists, political scientists, jurists, environmental scientists, and activists would need to be drawn in to help think through the immense empirical and political complexities posed by this urgent task.

Resource Rents, Redistribution, and Halving Global Poverty: The Resource Dividend

Summary This paper considers the proposal that each country distributes its resource rents directly to citizens as a universal and unconditional cash transfer, or Resource Dividend , and estimates its potential impact on global poverty for the years 2000–06. Using a global dataset on resource rents and the distribution of income, I find that if every developing country implemented the policy then the number of people living below $1-a-day would be cut by between 27% and 66%, depending on the year and the assumptions made. Looking ahead, poverty could be better than halved as long as commodity prices do not drop below their 2004 level.

Para erradicar a pobreza sistêmica: em defesa de um Dividendo dos Recursos Globais

A atual apropriação da riqueza de nosso planeta é muito desigual. As classes economicamente favorecidas utilizam muitíssimo mais os recursos mundiais, e o fazem de forma unilateral, sem dar qualquer compensação às classes menos favorecidas por seu consumo desproporcional. Invocando três diferentes razões da injustiça - o efeito das instituições sociais compartilhadas, a exclusão não compensada do uso dos recursos naturais e os efeitos de uma história comum e violenta , o objetivo do autor é mostrar que talvez seja possível reunir partidários de correntes dominantes do pensamento político normativo ocidental numa coalizão voltada para a erradicação da pobreza mundial mediante a introdução de um Dividendo dos Recursos Globais, ou DRG. Uma versão anterior deste artigo foi publicada pela Revista Lua Nova: Thomas Pogge. "Uma proposta de reforma: um dividendo global de recursos", Revista Lua Nova n. 34, 1994. Agradecemos à Revista Lua Nova pela autorização da reimpressão deste artigo.

Thomas Pogge’s Global Resources Dividend: A Critique and an Alternative

AbstractPogge’s proposal for a Global Resources Dividend (GRD) has been criticized because its likely effects would be less predictable than Pogge supposes and could even be counterproductive to the main aim of relieving poverty. The GRD might also achieve little with respect to its secondary aim of promoting environmental protection. This article traces the problems to Pogge’s inadequate conception of natural resources. It proposes instead to conceive of natural resources in terms of ‘ecological space’. Using this conception, redistributive principles follow with a more definite logic from Pogge’s own supporting moral argument. The proposed alternative approach also promises a more direct contribution to Pogge’s secondary aim of resource conservation and environmental protection. I conclude that if any redistributive resource-based tax should be levied on nations, then there are at least four decisive reasons to favour levying a tax related to a nation’s per capita utilization of ecological space rather than the GRD.